Power to your story and your perspective.

Have you ever noticed the birth of an idea? That feeling which makes you realize that something is right in front of everyone’s eyes, yet hidden, because nobody looked at it from your perspective. And then a wave of excitable energy passes through you as you get deeper into that perspective.

If you believe in The Cosmic Law of Interconnectedness, you may recognize that our ‘fresh’ perspectives are often simply connections. To quote Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things.” However, these connections draw heavily upon your knowledge, your exposure, your experiences, and invariably, your goodness. That makes you a unique weaver of these connections, equipped to knit a blanket (or design a cradle) for your new-born idea.

So, you have voiced your thoughts via blog comments, meetings, and events. We, however, lacked a platform to utilize the knowledge, experience, and goodness of the os.me audience for the benefit of a broader community. Many of you have ideas and perspectives that are unique and extremely valuable. Now, you can make your voice heard on os.me. On the homepage, you will see a button as shown here.

Write blog post

You can click on that button to write a blog post. Your blog post will be published on os.me and will be available to os.me subscribers as well as a broader internet audience. Here are some quick guidelines to get you started on the Create New Blog Post page.

Author Details

When reading a blog post, readers would often like to know a bit about the source of that idea – the author. There is a section at the bottom of the page called ‘Author Details’. This section is for you to describe yourself, upload your picture and share some details such as your name and location. For pictures, headshots usually work better. You can click on ‘Edit Info’ to enter your details. You need to enter this information only once, all your blog posts will then display these details at the bottom of the published post.

Feature Image in Your Story

At the top of any os.me blog post, there is an image or video shown. That visual is an integral part of the idea or story. ‘Feature Image’ is the tool for you to upload feature images for your blog posts. You can search for free images on several websites. Some image websites do not require attribution, however, we encourage attribution – because it’s the right thing to do. We are sharing a list of websites from where you can source royalty-free images for free. We do recommend that you familiarize yourself with their licensing terms.

Feature Image Size – We recommend using 1440 (length) x 1050 (height) pixels in size for a proper aspect ratio. Having said that, you can use other size images (landscape orientation). Usually images that are between 800 to 1500 pixels wide and 600 to 1050 pixels in height would work well. There are no hard constraints on image sizes; the image will be adjusted as required on the published blog. 

Title of Your Story

In an internet blog post, the title plays an important role. There is a blog post by Matt Lindley on vervesearch.com that provides some really simple tips for your title. Here they are in a nutshell with a small commentary of our own:

  • Make it Engaging – Keep in mind, the reader should like the title enough to click on it.
  • Set the Right Expectations – A title builds some expectation, leverage that moment.
  • Keep it Short and Sweet – On os.me, we recommend no more than 10 to 12 words.
  • Include a Keyword – What might your potential reader be searching for? Think it over and try to include that keyword in your title as well as in the first paragraph.

Tagline of  Your Story

The tagline is a teaser; almost like the trailer of a movie. You could share the core idea in a simple tagline, or perhaps you could build up the suspense. There’s an array of choices, so choose wisely. On os.me, we recommend no more than 15 to 20 words for a tagline.

Blog Post – Your Story

This is your corner where your ideas can take shape. You have an opportunity to share your experiences and your stories and describe how they have shaped you into a better individual. Bear in mind that’s just one line of thought – you can share pretty much anything that helps the world around you discover a better version of themselves. You also have a responsibility to the reader to share enough detail so they can learn and maybe even follow in your footsteps.

Publishing your post – Writing a blog post can often be time-consuming. You can continue to save your work as a draft copy using the ‘Save Draft’ button, until you feel ready to publish your post. Before you publish it, we encourage you to proofread your post and do your final edits. Once you are completely satisfied, it’s time to click the ‘Publish Post’ button to make it go live!

Now that we have the ‘how-to’ out of the way, we arrive at the interesting parts – the topic central to your idea, your happiness, and your story. Ben Okri, the Nigerian poet and novelist, put it nicely – “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” So do not let any imperfections discourage you, they make you – you.

Want your post to be featured on os.me?

We have an editorial team that reads every post written by you & carefully selects featured posts from a large volume of submissions. Featured Writing helps us spread the goodness. We have found that our community prefers certain kinds of posts, so here are some quick tips for you to consider if you wish your blog to be featured:

  1. Write an engaging story –  And the audience will actively participate in comments and discussions. Not only that, people will share your posts with their friends and with the world from their social media profiles.
  2. Only post original content – Your perspective and your thoughts are highly valuable to the os.me community. To encourage authors to write and share their perspectives, the original stories are considered on priority for selecting a featured post. So do give a thought before publishing your story -Is this an original post for os.me or if it’s been published elsewhere in the past?
  3.  Your voice – We want to hear your voice. We want to hear about your experience. Is your own voice obvious in your post sharing truthful challenges? 
  4. Length of the post – We also pay attention to the length of the post. The ideal length is 800-1200 words.

Our community is made up of people who listen with their hearts & they usually like personal posts more, that is, writings where you have shared your personal journey and lessons. Preachy & dry posts do not go well.

Finally – as telling the story will involve communicating with your audience, these three magic words can help make your communication more effective.

You just never know how your words may help someone. Thank you for choosing os.me to share your thoughts with our community and the world at large.

So, onward and upward with your ideas! Share them here and help us all become better versions of ourselves!